It’s a question all mature pre-med students are likely to ask themselves and it’s understandable for many reasons. For me personally, I already had a very successful career in IT which provided me with a nice sports car, my own rented cottage and a host of other luxuries that I wasn’t sure I was willing to give-up. Besides which, many people thought I was mad to waste ten years of career experience in an industry, it didn’t help that I wouldn’t be able to earn in medicine my previous salary for another fifteen years (minimum), of course however, it was never about the money for me, so this wasn’t a really an issue. But I had other questions and concerns going through my mind…
- If I get in to Medical School at twenty-seven, followed by five years training before foundation years, how many years am I actually going to get practising medicine?
- How old will the other students be at Medical School and will I be singled out as the ‘oldy’ or simply just not fit-in?
- Can I financially and socially adapt to the change of becoming a full-time student?
- Academically, after so many years in the ‘real-world’, will I be able to cope with amount of work required and what about the assessments and exams?
The list goes on and on and we’ll all be able to add and remove different questions that concern us individually. I think the first thing to remember is that you’re not alone and the internet is a great place for finding like minded mature pre-med and medical students. The other thing to remember is that many medical schools are now keen to recruit maturer students.
“Mature students bring a breadth of life experience,” says Peter McCrorie, who runs the graduate entry course at St George’s, “Some school leaving students have that too, but people who are older have more life experiences and that’s a very useful thing to have in medicine.”
We also have many other things going for us, admitadely we might not be able to drink as much as our fellow younger students, but we make-up for that in that we tend to work harder and often achieve better grades, we have life experiences that we can apply to medicine and our studies also.
I recommend reading the following article on Student BMJ, Does age matter?
